Sarah Jeong

Artificial intelligence cannot solve the problem of not knowing what the hell you're doing and not really caring one way or the other. It's not a solution for shortsightedness and lack of transparency.

Artificial intelligence is just a new tool, one that can be used for good and for bad purposes and one that comes with new dangers and downsides as well. We know already that although machine learning has huge potential, data sets with ingrained biases will produce biased results - garbage in, garbage out.

Are whisper networks good? That question itself is a little flat. Whisper networks arise in a vacuum of justice. They alleviate an untenable condition; they do not actually address it.

Wherever information gathers and flows, two predators follow closely behind it: censorship and surveillance. The case of digital money is no exception. Where money becomes a series of signals, it can be censored; where money becomes information, it will inform on you.

In a cashless society, the cash has been converted into numbers, into signals, into electronic currents. In short: Information replaces cash.

Information is lightning-quick. It crosses cities, states, and national borders in the twinkle of an eye. It passes through many kinds of devices, flowing from phone to phone and computer to computer, rather than being sealed away in those silent marble temples we used to call banks.

Surveillance has long been theorized as a way to control the surveilled - namely, by getting them to police themselves out of fear of being watched.

The effect of letting someone sue without showing harm is obvious: It makes it really easy to sue.

In the early days, I loved Facebook. I loved being able to keep tabs on hundreds of college classmates all at once, of being able to tag all my dorm mates in the photos we took on our garbage 7 megapixel cameras, of creeping on crushes, of keeping up with every person I met at a party or in a classroom without doing very much work.

When I was in college, my high school best friend and I had a terrible falling-out. It was entirely because of Facebook.

In America, surveillance has always played an outsized role in the relationship between creditors and debtors.

People don't object to spying on the grounds that the secret dossier about them might be full of errors. They object to spying because it's spying.